All posts tagged diy

A 2 foot tall table-top easel that was perfect for every room of our house. But they offer them no more. I have been looking on eBay and Craig’s List for years, and haven’t found anything even close.

So I took matters into my own tentacles and just made one. What the Hell? I have Man-tools (a chop saw and a brad nailer)…and I’m clever.

I started with a small pile of poplar and cut all my components.

A spine, a base with 2 feet, and a shelf with a lip….pretty simple.

All of my wood is 3/4 inch thick except for the Lip, it’s only 1/4 inch thick. The Spine and Base pieces are about 1 1/2 inches wide and the 2 feet are 2 inches wide. OOOh yeah, the shelf is 3 1/2 wide.

I used Gorilla Wood Glue to attach the small 3″ spine piece to the bottom of my 26 1/2″ spine and clamped them untill they were dry.

About an hour.

I assume that I could have skiped the brads and glued all my pieces together, but the clamping and waiting will take forever. It’s faster to shoot a few brads.

I then assembled my base and feet.

Stacked the base pieces and nailed/glued the feet long ways underneath….shooting a couple 2 inch brads through all 3….and leaving a 1 1/4″ gap between the 5″ base pieces.

Trimmed the bottom of my newly glued together spine with a chop saw at a slight 5 degree angle. Just enough to make my shelf pitch back.

Then I slipped the complete spine into the open space in my base….and shot a brad through the bottom to hold it in place.

Nailed and glued the front lip onto my shelf piece.

The shelf sits centered right on top of the 3 inch spine piece.

……and another brad to hold it in place.

Lastly, I glued and clamped the final piece of my spine on top of the shelf.

While the glue dried, I filled all my brad holes with natural wood filler.

Once the spine was dried, about an hour, I used the chop saw to trim the top to a 5 degree angle…to match the pitch at the bottom.

I gave a light sanding to all my edges, nothing too precise….it doesn’t have to be perfect.

The whole thing got a coat of flat black latex paint. No surprises there……but I think I could have stained the poplar pretty easily. Or even just a coat of shiny polyurethane.

These were so easy that I wiped out 3 at once. (Made it real easy to photograph the different steps…you thought I was only making one, didn’t you?)

Gave myself a BIG OL’ pat on the back for these.

They were so much easier that I expected………and pretty cheap; maybe 25 bucks for 3.

Like this:

There is only one good thing about having a crappy front door that we don’t like…….

(it’s aluminum – you can tell from the dents – and it has that weird little fake stained glass window)

…….Being able to paint it on a whim.

For Christmas we slapped some Martha Stewart “Barn” on her just to coordinate with all the holiday decor out there.

We loved it in December, and hated it since January.

Time to take her back to a sunnier color.

But, before we do. I have to properly cover over that red.

Red is the hardest color to paint…and the hardest color to paint over.

Many, many coats both ways.

That’s why I start with Kilz 2 Latex Primer. Latex means that it’s not Oil-based and it cleans-up with water. It also dries quickly.

I remove the door knob and deadbolt. ( Don’t kid yourselves, you can’t paint perfectly around them……just take them off. Same with switchplate covers, vents, and light fixtures.)

Then I use a small foam roller to apply the primer.

It was a beautiful warm day and 2 coats of primer dried pretty quickly.

Tons better already…Am I right?

Now to pick a “Happy” color…..

Like Behr “Mandarin”. The perfect shade of “crayon” orange.

There is no happier color on Earth.

Now to roll on my semi-gloss orange paint, also with a small roller….(use flat or eggshell paint for walls and gloss or semi-gloss for trim work. Don’t ever reverse that rule, no matter what the guys mixing your paint tell you)

The trick that I’ve found with painting, is to use way less paint than you think you need. Don’t over saturate the roller or brush. This will avoid drips…..

It’s much easier to add a second coat than to wipe away drips, so start slow.

Trust me, I’m an excellent painter, and this is sound advice.

It took me about 2 coats of orange to cover the front door, way fewer than if I had tried to just paint over the red.

Here she is…

Even the Doberman liked it ….(technically, she was watching people walk in front of the house)

And yes, the cow skull-slash-pinecone wreath combo is back. Some people think it is a Christmas decoration…but it’s not.

At Christmas tree lots there is always a pile of branches trimmed from the bottom of freshly purchased trees. Most places will gladly give these away. We sort through and only take the Noble and Frasier pine. Those pines will usually last longer and have furrier branches than just Scotch or Douglas pines.

We’re just picky like that.

Start with an 18 inch (4 dollar) wreath form like the one we got from the craft store.

Just wire the pine branches onto the form with green paddle wire. Make sure all the branches are about the same length and going in the same direction.

I also picked up some plastic red berries at the craft store. I simply poked them through the greens and wired them from behind into the wreath.

Over the years, I have accumulated a pretty “sizeable” collection of vintage ornaments. (without really a purpose for them)

Here are a few of my favorites.

I also happened to have a chicken-wire wreath form from Michael’s.

I’ve seen hot-glued vintage ornament wreaths online, but never one this big. It’s almost 3 feet across. If I glued it all together I would never be able to store it…….or even move it without breaking several dozen.

No, I have to assemble/disassemble this thing yearly.

The wreath form already had a little bit of grapevine twisted over it, but I added the thin silk garland and a “zig-zagged” string of B-lights (just for a warm glow).

I just started by hooking ornaments onto the chicken-wire wreath form…or the grapevine…or the lights…or even on that thin silk garland. Just as long as they are hooked into something. Beginning at the very bottom…..

….and slowly hooking my way up the sides to the top. Squeezing in as many as I possibly can.

Several hours later…..I have this amazingness.

Several hours…….

(That’s why I took so many pictures of it when I was finished)

I wasn’t started in this direction when I first began collecting vintage ornaments…..

Like this:

I draw a lot of sketches for projects. Sometimes I forget about them entirely…….and other times, I draw the same projects over and over.

This is one of those repetitive ideas I’ve had.

I found this sketch on my notepad by the workbench in the garage.

Remember almost a year ago when we started collecting pallet wood to make our headboard wall in the master bedroom? We decided that it was just a little rustic nasty-gross to put in the bedroom. Well, I didn’t get rid of it……..

I know, I know, “Cough-Hoarder-Cough”.

Good thing, Because I thought I’d hack it up to make a big ol’ barn wood (read that – pallet wood) star.

I started by cutting all those pallet pieces into what I believed was 5 perfect 36 degree points.

Apparently not.

I had to get Jamie’s math skills involved with this one.

The 2 of us working together could NOT figure out the process for making a perfect five point star.

We Googled. We Sketched. We attempted to make a small 12 inch version……Nothing worked.

Geometry Sucks.

We gave up and went to bed.

When I looked in the garage the next morning, this is what the new work table looked like…

Notice how there are several star drawings, a protractor (we made a 9 PM run to H Depot), and a dozen small 36 degree mitered wood pieces. None of it helped.

Way Too Complicated……I just can’t do “perfect”. But I might be able to do “folk art”.

The very definition of folk art is,” Imperfect art the requires very little natural talent, skill or exerted effort of any kind to accomplish”.

(LIGHT BULB over my head)

I took a deep breath, and decided to approach the whole project from a “folk art” point of view.

I lay all the cut pallet pieces on the floor, where Jamie had started drawing a Pentagram in chalk as a guide (we both agreed that it looked like we were resorting to calling on the Dark Lord to guide us …..and erased it quickly. I don’t think even “He, who shall not be named” has the power to create a perfect star), and lay out my star-ish shape.

It was a pretty good start.

I made the 2 bottom “legs” the same length and met the 2 smaller boards in the exact middle with the same angle. ‘Till everything looked like this.

It’s not a perfect star. But it definitely has the look I was going for.

Then I reinforced all the joints with small boards…..I put a scrap under each joint and shot it full of brads.

Here’s what it looks like from behind.

Here’s a closer shot of the joint pieces…just scraps really.

I wanted everything to have a “Vintage Barnwood” look. So I dry brushed over the palate wood with the only flat white paint we had. Ceiling Primer.

If you’ve never used a dry brush technique. It’s pretty simple. Just dip the tip of the brush in paint, wipe the excess paint off your brush on a piece of scrap and then lightly drag it over your surface. Use way less paint than you think that you need. It’s much better to do a thin layer of paint and keep adding more, than to saturate your surface and make it look painted.

I wanted the wood grain to show through. Like old, weathered barn wood.

I think I achieved that look.

See? Not too white, and not too “woody”? Just what I wanted.

My star was extremely flimsy. I had a plan to reinforce it further and hide the weird joint pieces from the sides. So I trimmed the whole star, inner layer as well as outer, with mitered cedar 1X2 s that I also dry brushed….but, this time with red paint. There are still a lot of cedar scraps in the garage left from when we lined the walls. How could I throw them away? “Every part of the buffalo”. Remember that mantra?

I had a small tester of Martha Stewart red from a different project that never saw the light of day. It’s called “BARN”. I think that name was exactly what I was going for with this project.

I thought it looked a little “Raspberry” at first, but once it dried….perfection.

The perfect “Barn Red”, that Martha sure knows how to name her colors.

Still a little flimsy. No worries. I was ready for that too.

I added a second 2 1/2 inch star trim inside the first star with cedar we had left in the garage. This one was much easier. I didn’t need to calculate any angles. I just followed the lines of the big star for all my angled cuts. I attached it with more brads. I made sure that I only shot the brads into the very edges of the wood, not the middle. I’ll explain why later.

My first instinct was to dry brush this red too, but changed my mind when I saw it. (not to ruin any surprises, but y’all will see why in a later post) So white ceiling primer was dry brushed on the inner cedar star as well.

Once I got everything together, I touched up the red, to be a little bit more “Red” and to get into all the crevices that I didn’t see on the first go-round with the red paint.

Here’s my finished star. Almost 6 feet tall.

Pretty Cool? Right? Everything I used, I already had. So it was practically free.